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Show HN: For 10 World Cups, my model's 2 favorites had the champion every time

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41–50 of 53 posts

Re: Show HN: For 10 World Cups, my model's 2 favorites had the champion every time

#41
post #21
post #15

Does the model account for the blatant favouritism in the refs? We used to laugh about it before but as the cameras have gotten better it has become a lot more visible. And in this case, is turning the tournament into a bit of a joke. -- Egypt was robbed.

It's quite unlikely football is one of the few sports without a doping problem and with only very few cases where the referee was paid off. Since ancient times in Rome where they said "bread and games" are needed to keep the commoners happy, many generations of rulers had time to optimize large-scale sports events. My personal theory is that these kind of extremely unfair decisions in football are a net benefit to st…

I don't know why you are calling it 'soccer'.

It's FIFA World Cup - Fédération Internationale de Football Association. Football, not soccer.

Re: Show HN: For 10 World Cups, my model's 2 favorites had the champion every time

#42
Make sure your email is on file with every horrible news outlet in the world so they can write over 9000 stories about you before the next World Cup.

Get a few nice glamorshots and make sure you have something else in the queue before then to plug during the interviews.

Re: Show HN: For 10 World Cups, my model's 2 favorites had the champion every time

#43
post #15

Does the model account for the blatant favouritism in the refs? We used to laugh about it before but as the cameras have gotten better it has become a lot more visible. And in this case, is turning the tournament into a bit of a joke. -- Egypt was robbed.

The FIFA-planned game schedule is also surprising. Argentina have not had to face a single 'big' contender through the tournament, until now.

The top 4 countries got seeded so they avoid each other.

Re: Show HN: For 10 World Cups, my model's 2 favorites had the champion every time

#44
post #41
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's quite unlikely football is one of the few sports without a doping problem and with only very few cases where the referee was paid off. Since ancient times in Rome where they said "bread and games" are needed to keep the commoners happy, many generations of rulers had time to optimize large-scale sports events. My personal theory is that these kind of extremely unfair decisions in football are a net benefit to st…

I don't know why you are calling it 'soccer'. It's FIFA World Cup - Fédération Internationale de Football Association. Football, not soccer.

Valid point, I've been brainwashed in school to use the American term even though I live tens of thousands of kilometers away from the US.

Re: Show HN: For 10 World Cups, my model's 2 favorites had the champion every time

#45
post #16
post #4

A good AI would calculate refereeing decisions and put Argentina at 100% unless England can pull off a miracle against FIFA today.

No good AI would cherry-pick data to this extent. Only people are capable of that

Maybe, but it's been widely reported. BBC wrote about it here: https://www.bbc.com/sport/football/articles/cx2wkwd7e6go

Since that article was published, England had the red card ban for Quansah extended to two games instead of one with no appeal so he couldn't play against Argentina if England were to get that far, and shortly after equalising in the quarter final Switzerland had a red card for a second yellow against Embolo for diving which had originally been given to Argentina. If you don't know, there is no right for VAR to give a yellow card in this case - it can only be done if it's mistaken identity, which is what they claimed. https://www.theguardian.com/football/2026/jul/12/switzerland...

Now of course none of this is evidence of bias, but it's worth noting that this has been happening after claims of pro-Argentina bias has been widespread enough that the BBC and other institutions wrote about it.

Re: Show HN: For 10 World Cups, my model's 2 favorites had the champion every time

#46
post #45
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No good AI would cherry-pick data to this extent. Only people are capable of that

Maybe, but it's been widely reported. BBC wrote about it here: https://www.bbc.com/sport/football/articles/cx2wkwd7e6go Since that article was published, England had the red card ban for Quansah extended to two games instead of one with no appeal so he couldn't play against Argentina if England were to get that far, and shortly after equalising in the quarter final Switzerland had a red card for a second yellow again…

It's been widely reported that the coach of a side that lost in unfortunate circumstances to Argentina whinged a lot about the match officials disallowing one of his side's goals. This is normal, as is media reporting on silly conspiracy theories. Since the article the super conspiratorial "all Argentine refeering team" also failed to do any damage to France's prospects against Morocco whatsoever, and the Norwegians have joined the Ghanaians in complaining that England have been getting scandalously bad decisions too!

Nobody with an adult understanding of sport honestly believes that the ban for Quansah is some sort of conspiracy to guarantee Argentina won. I mean, apart from him getting the normal ban for a bad tackle, the only chance he'd get of making the starting lineup against Argentina was as an out-of-position option that would by marginally easier for Argentina to play against.

The "mistaken identity" rule was very clearly changed before the World Cup to allow it to be used to review decisions when the referee mistakenly carded a player or awarded a penalty for something actually caused by his opponent (not just when he booked a different player on the same team). Your assertion is simply false, as your own link confirms. Also, of the few "mistaken identity" decision reversals, Embolo's ridiculous dive to try to [initially] get his opponent into trouble was by far the most obvious and deserving. But yes, losing sides will generally whinge more about rule changes which mean their player can't get away with cheating like he might have done in the past than they will about their player's decision to cheat costing them a game they might have won.

Really, the only major decision involving Argentina that's not completely consistent with other games was Messi avoiding trouble for accidentally studding an opponent's calf (a bit like the much-debated Balogun incident) in a low pressure group stage game, and we don't need a massive conspiracy to understand match officials might be scared to send off the world's most famous player in his last tournament for an inconsequential bit of clumsiness, if they even saw it clearly.

Re: Show HN: For 10 World Cups, my model's 2 favorites had the champion every time

#47
post #41
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's quite unlikely football is one of the few sports without a doping problem and with only very few cases where the referee was paid off. Since ancient times in Rome where they said "bread and games" are needed to keep the commoners happy, many generations of rulers had time to optimize large-scale sports events. My personal theory is that these kind of extremely unfair decisions in football are a net benefit to st…

I don't know why you are calling it 'soccer'. It's FIFA World Cup - Fédération Internationale de Football Association. Football, not soccer.

> I don't know why you are calling it 'soccer'.

Probably because the sport is called [association football] of which soccer is one of the short forms (from the British) same as football, and is generally used to distinguish itself in places where other sports from the same football category are prevalent.

FIFA is an association that governs various association football variants including futsal. Using acronym expansion on FIFA as a canonical source for what to call any particular variant of association football would be misguided.

Re: Show HN: For 10 World Cups, my model's 2 favorites had the champion every time

#48
post #31

I've updated the magic weights, and I too can get the result I want: WEIGHTS = { 'w_xg': 0.09, 'w_goals': -0.07, 'w_star': 0.018, 'w_value': 0.18, 'w_rank': 0.4, 'w_def': -0.12, 'xga_share': 0.85, 'w_gk': 0.0042 } $ python3 worldcup_model.py --sims 100000 2026 FIFA World Cup -- championship probabilities (100,000 simulations, from Round of 32) 1. England 11.7% * 2. France 10.0% * 3. Spain 9.3% * 4. Argentina 8.4% 5.…

Maybe in an alternate reality. Jokes aside, discovering the right weights to match the current fixture, along with the limited data available, were the key challenges in forecasting at such an early stage.

Re: Show HN: For 10 World Cups, my model's 2 favorites had the champion every time

#49
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The baseline matters here: favorites win World Cups all the time. How often would "always pick the two pre-tournament favorites" have gotten the champion in these same 10 tournaments? Without that comparison, 10/10 tells us basically nothing.

France was far and away the pre-tournament favorite for 2026, if anything it's somewhat impressive that OP's model correctly predicted that they wouldn't make it. Here's hoping they were right for England as well, but we'll find out soon enough.

That was exactly the point I was trying to make in this preprint. I appreciate your comment.

Re: Show HN: For 10 World Cups, my model's 2 favorites had the champion every time

#50

There is no MODEL for pure Argentine magic. vamos carajos! vamooooooooo con todo!!! Our time has come again.

Hahaha, as a Brazilian, this hurts. But as a man of science, I can't argue with the numbers. Congratulations, hermano.
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